Meta is building a 4,300-mile subsea cable linking the United States and France as it expands the infrastructure supporting its global online services. The Petal system is expected to enter service in 2029 and is designed to carry up to one petabit of data per second.
Meta says that capacity is equivalent to about 125,000 gigabytes per second and would be twice that of the most advanced transoceanic cables currently in operation. It claims Petal will be the first cable to provide petabit-scale capacity across an ocean.
The company says the system could carry enough data for three-quarters of the world’s population to stream music simultaneously. Its design uses two-core fibre, allowing two light paths within each strand and increasing capacity without a proportional rise in power consumption or physical infrastructure.
Meta’s expanding subsea cable network
Petal is part of a wider push by Meta to build and invest in subsea cables, which carry data between continents. The company says it has participated in more than 20 such projects over the past decade, reaching every continent except Antarctica.
Its largest planned system is Project Waterworth, announced in February 2025. Meta says the cable will extend for more than 31,000 miles, connecting the United States, Brazil, South Africa, India and other regions across five continents.
Parts of Waterworth are expected to be laid about 4.3 miles below the surface to help protect the system from ship anchors and other hazards. The project is due to be wholly owned by Meta, which would make it only the company’s third solely owned subsea cable, according to telecoms research firm TeleGeography.
Meta’s 2Africa system, meanwhile, encircles the African continent and connects it with Europe, the Middle East and South Asia. The company says its core was completed last year, with landings in 33 countries and potential reach to 3 billion people.
The company is working with Japanese firms NEC and Sumitomo Electric Industries on Petal, while French telecoms operator Orange is responsible for the landing on France’s Atlantic coast.
Meta has also worked with corporate rivals on earlier projects. The MAREA cable between Virginia and Spain, completed in 2017, is jointly owned by Meta, Microsoft and telecoms company Telxius.
The scale of the investment remains undisclosed for Petal and Waterworth. TechCrunch previously reported that Waterworth could cost more than $10 billion, although such projects represent only part of Meta’s wider infrastructure spending.
Meta expects to spend between $130 billion and $145 billion on capital expenditure this year, compared with $72.2 billion in 2025. The company is expanding its subsea cable network as services including its Muse personal AI agent require the movement of large volumes of data between its data centres and users around the world.
